How to Check Your Car for Hail Damage

Check your car in soft, low-angle light, horizontal panels first, by looking along each panel at a reflection rather than straight at the paint. Then check the glass, lights, trim and paint, and photograph every panel the same way. That tells you whether you have hail damage, and it gives a technician enough to assess the car from photos.

The short answer: the full check, in order

Hail damage is easy to miss and easy to misjudge. A car can look fine at noon and be covered in dents at dusk. This order catches the most damage with the least guesswork:

1. Pick your light. An overcast day, early morning, late afternoon, or a garage with one bright light you can hold low. Not midday sun.
2. Photograph first, then rinse if you need to. Take your first photos as the car is. If pollen or grime hides fine detail, a gentle rinse afterwards helps. Skip the wax.
3. Start with the roof, hood and trunk lid. They face the sky and take the hardest hits.
4. Read the reflections. Look along each panel and watch a straight line slide across it.
5. Move to the sides, edges and pillars.
6. Check everything that is not a panel: glass, sunroof, mirrors, lights, trim.
7. Sort chips from dents.
8. Take the photos a technician needs.

Plan for a slow walk around the car, not a quick glance. The goal is to find the damage once, properly, rather than finding a little more of it every time the light changes. If a storm has just passed, look the car over for broken glass and lights first, then come back to the panels when the light is right.

Each step is below, with what to look for and what to do about it.

Get the light right first

A hail dent changes the shape of the panel, not its colour. You see shape through the way light bends across a surface, so the light you check in decides what you find.

• Bright overhead sun hides dents. It lights the whole panel evenly and washes out the shallow shadows a dent makes. This is why so many people find "new" hail damage days after a storm. It was there all along.
• Soft light with a direction shows them. Cloud cover, early morning and late afternoon all give you that.
• In a garage, use one strong light, held low. A work light or a phone torch held near the panel and swept slowly across it throws a small shadow on the far side of every dent.

If the first look in bad light found nothing, look again in good light before you decide the car is clean.

Start with the roof, hood and trunk lid

Hail falls mostly from above, so the panels that face the sky usually carry the most dents and the deepest ones. We cover why in more detail, and what it means for the repair, in our post on hail damage to the hood and roof.

The roof is the panel people skip, because they cannot see it from the ground. Use a sturdy step stool and look along it from each side. On taller vehicles, this is the only way to know what is up there.

Work the hood from the windshield end looking forward, then from the front looking back. Do the trunk lid or tailgate top the same way.

Read reflections, not paint

Looking straight down at a panel tells you very little. Looking along it tells you almost everything.

• Crouch so your eye is near the level of the panel and look across the surface, not at it.
• Find a straight line in the reflection. A roofline, a fence top, the edge of a garage door or a strip of ceiling light all work.
• Move your head slowly so the line slides across the panel. Over flat metal it stays straight. Over a dent it wobbles, pinches or kinks.

Hail dents are typically round and shallow, and they usually come in groups spread across a panel rather than one at a time. If you find one, assume there are more nearby and slow down.

Once the top panels are done, the sides are quicker.

Then the sides, edges and pillars

Doors, fenders and quarter panels catch hail at an angle. They tend to show fewer and shallower dents, and mostly on the side of the car that faced the storm.

Give extra attention to the places where a panel turns a corner:

• Roof rails and the edges where the roof meets the side of the car.
• The pillars on either side of the windshield.
• The tops of the doors and the frames around the windows.
• The front edge of the hood and the top edge of the trunk lid.

Dents on edges and body lines are harder to see and often harder to repair, so it is worth finding them now rather than at the estimate.

Check everything that is not a panel

Panels are only part of the picture. Walk the car again and look at:

• Windshield, windows and sunroof for chips, star breaks and cracks.
• Mirror housings and light lenses for cracks.
• Plastic trim, mouldings and roof rails for cracks or pieces missing.
• Wiper arms, antenna and anything mounted on the roof.

These parts get replaced rather than repaired with PDR, and parts can take time to arrive, so knowing early matters.

If glass is broken, cover it before the next rain. Under Alberta's Insurance Act, the statutory conditions in an auto policy ask you to protect the car from further loss, at the insurer's expense. The same conditions say no repairs beyond what is immediately necessary until your insurer has consented in writing or had a reasonable chance to inspect, so cover it, do not fix it. For the full sequence after a storm, see what to do after a Calgary hailstorm.

Sort chips from dents

This is the distinction that matters most for the repair.

• A dent bends the reflection, but the colour across it stays even and the surface stays glossy.
• A chip or crack shows as a small spot that looks different: a pale fleck of primer, a dull grey of bare metal, or a fine hairline in the clear coat around the centre of a dent.

Look closely at the centre of the biggest dents on each panel, since that is where paint is most likely to have broken.

Why it matters: paintless dent repair keeps your factory paint where the paint is intact. Where paint is broken, that spot needs refinishing, and timing starts to matter. Our guide on fixing hail damage before winter explains why broken paint and a Calgary winter are a bad combination.

Take the photos a technician needs

Good photos turn a guess into an assessment. Take them in the same soft, low-angle light you checked in.

• One photo per panel, looking along it, with a straight reflection crossing the dents. Do every panel, including ones you think are clean.
• The roof from the step stool, from both sides.
• A wide shot of each side, plus the front and back, so the panels can be placed.
• Close-ups of every chip, crack, broken lens or damaged trim piece, with a coin or key beside it for size.
• No flash aimed straight at the panel. It tends to flatten dents out of the picture.

Note the date and place of the storm with the photos. Then keep the originals, unedited.

What a driveway check cannot tell you

Your check will tell you whether the car has hail damage and roughly where. It will not give you an accurate count. Dents are read by light, and a driveway does not have controlled light, so a home check usually finds fewer dents than a proper inspection.

That count is what an estimate, a claim and a repair timeline are built on. So treat your check as the first look, not the last one.

Send the photos, or bring the car

If your check found damage, the next step is a proper count. Book a free 30-minute scan at the shop in SE Calgary, or send the photos you just took, at a low angle with light running across each panel. You will hear what the damage looks like panel by panel, whether any paint is broken, and what the repair involves, before you decide what to do next.